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I'm trying out handling my email in the terminal, though I still use a graphical client for some tasks.
Reflections on using a plaintext email client
I'm using Aerc as my email client right now.
Aerc settings live in ~Library/Preferences/aerc/
To use a maildir, set the source in accounts.conf as
source = maildir://Users/myself/Mail/
Aerc wants your maildirs to be lumped together into a common folder. Here's how I configured this in postfix:
sudo postconf -e "home_mailbox = Mail/Inbox/"
The path is relative to your home directory. The trailing slash ensures that it's a maildir and not an mbox.
Html emails can be formatted with w3m (available on Homebrew)
text/html=w3m -T text/html -cols $(($(tput cols) > 80 ? 80 : $(tput cols))) -dump -o display_image=false -o display_link_number=true
Aerc has no caching. If you want your emails to be stored locally, you can set up a service to pull your remote emails into a local maildir.
First, make sure postfix is running
sudo postfix start
Set up a .fetchmailrc in your home directory.
poll imap.gmail.com proto IMAP auth password
# map the email address to the machine username
user "me@clarity.com" is myself here
password 'secret'
# keep: don't delete emails from the server
# idle: keep the connection alive. note that this won't work if
# you need to check multiple inboxes or accounts.
keep, ssl, sslcertck, idle
# in order to use `idle` we need to pick which folder is being
# watched
folder "Inbox"
For logging add a line like this to the start of the config:
set logfile "Users/myself/log/fetchmail"
It can't create the log, so make sure it already exists.
mkdir ~/log touch ~/log/fetchmail set logfile "/Users/me/log/fetchmail"
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Written August 6, 2021